A conventional digital video recorder (“DVR”) is a device that is placed in the home which allows a person to record audiovisual content (e.g., a TV program) to local physical storage, such as a hard drive, and play the content back later at their convenience.
In a subsequent evolution of the digital video recorder, equipment that recorded and stored audiovisual content was moved from the home to other network locations; e.g., to upstream locations in a content distribution network.
In a conventional network-based DVR (“nDVR”) storage solution, a recording is created and stored separately for each requesting user, which generally requires that costly enterprise class storage must be used to store each recording separately (based, for example, upon considerations of applicable copyright law).
In further conventional nDVR storage solutions, recordings of a program that are bit-for-bit identical can be deduplicated to a single instance when archived. However, two recordings of a single program will not be bit-for-bit identical if the two recordings do not begin at identical times and end at identical times.